The Winters in Bloom (10 page)

When Ray came home, they were holding the ceremony after Mark Spitz won the 100-meter freestyle. She greeted him, and nodded at the television, so he would know what was going on. It was all so thrilling.

“You know I don’t like sports,” Ray muttered, and walked out of the room.

The fact that she considered following him shows how foolish she was. Mark Spitz had set world records in every race. He was the greatest athlete of all time, as the newscasters kept saying. She wasn’t going to walk out on an American making history in hopes of getting a smile of approval from Ray.

When the program was over, she rocked David and put him to bed. Finally, she went to the kitchen, where her husband was sitting at the table, going through the receipts in his briefcase.

As often happened, she found herself suddenly feeling sorry for him. He looked tired, and he was undoubtedly feeling neglected. She asked if he’d had dinner on the road. When he said no, she got out the ham and Swiss and started piling it on the rye bread, the way Ray liked it, with tomatoes on top. She could feel him watching her, and so she made small talk about the day, nothing about the Olympics, probably some cute thing that happened with David.

He didn’t say anything until she set the sandwich in front of him; then he said, “I don’t want
that
.” He even crossed his arms and rolled his lips together, as if his hands might move against his will and force the sandwich into his mouth.

It was after nine. The baby had gotten up at five-thirty in the morning and napped for only forty-five minutes all day. “I thought you were hungry,” she said, as evenly as she could manage.

“I am. However, the last time I checked, a sandwich is not dinner.”

She was twenty-four years old, which was considered a full-grown adult back then. She had a child and a mortgage and a husband, same as most of her friends. And yes, she knew that the adult thing to do would be to cook something he liked and wrap up the sandwich so he could have it tomorrow for lunch. If he hadn’t said “the last time I checked,” she might have been able to do it, despite how tired she was. But he sounded so damned smug, and he looked positively imperial sitting there, looking down on the poor rejected sandwich.

So she picked up the plate and walked across the kitchen and dumped not only the sandwich but also the plate into the garbage. She heard the ceramic dish snap in half as it hit the side of the metal can.

Her husband mumbled something to the effect that she was nuts. She wasn’t really listening. She already knew she was going to regret what she’d done. It was a nice plate.

NINE

I
f you
have been happily married for a few years, and you are over thirty, the people around you will often hint—or even say—that you don’t have much time left to make The Decision™. This was the situation in which Kyra found herself seven years ago when she created a Word file,
Pro and Con For You Know What
. She planned to keep a journal of her thoughts and record her daily mood (1 for Yes, −1 for No, and 0 for Unsure) for a full year. Of course she knew the final result would be a negative number, possibly three digits, maybe even −365. She was positive she didn’t want a baby. This was purely a test—and Kyra liked tests; she wrote them for a living—to prove conclusively what she already knew.

The biggest argument against having children was always her husband’s feelings, but right after that came her own guilt about what had happened with Amy. Most days, it was easy to record a −1 in the journal and go back to her life. Her first positive number came about two weeks into her test, when she was on the bus, coming home from work. She was pushing her way down the aisle, trying to find a seat, when she saw a baby settled on his mother’s lap. Such an ordinary scene, but this time, she was stopped in her tracks; she couldn’t even make her lips form the polite words “how cute.” She just stared, like the baby was a messenger from another world, come to tell her—what?
Don’t forget to have one of me. You know you want to.
Or even,
it’s wrong to lie to yourself
.

She grudgingly wrote a 1 in the journal that day, though she knew the baby messenger was wrong. She most certainly did not know that she wanted one of his kind. And to her relief, the test continued to prove her right. After keeping score for two months, there were far more −1s than 1s. Her tally had been negative the first week and the first month and it had remained negative so far. Good.

Most of the arguments she wrote in the journal were also against the idea. Beyond the big issues, she had a lot of pragmatic reasons why having a baby would be bad:

1. They’d have to move, and she loved their apartment. They’d probably have to leave the city to afford a bigger place. She wasn’t a suburbs-type person.

2. They’d have to buy all that baby stuff: a crib, a stroller, a changing table, a car seat, a rocker, clothes, toys, etc, etc. It would be so expensive, and so daunting to deal with now that she’d just been promoted.

3. She would gain a lot of weight. What if she couldn’t lose it later? What if she ended up fat for life?

4. She might die. It was unlikely, but not impossible. It would be so much better if it were impossible.

5. She was probably infertile anyway. She had no evidence to support this, except for karma. If karma existed, she would never be able to have her own baby.

Unfortunately, number five was one thing she couldn’t just write down and dismiss. She spent a disturbing amount of time worrying about being infertile—disturbing because why did she care? Several pages of her Word document had nothing but the question: “What if I
can’t
have a baby?” She estimated that at least half of her 1s were based on nothing other than this fear. Finally she decided to make an appointment with her gynecologist. He ran some blood tests first. A week later, he gave her a thorough exam, and told her that though he couldn’t be sure, everything looked to be in working order.

“No reason not to start trying,” he said. “You might be pregnant before you know it.”

“Thanks,” she said. “But I’m not planning to get pregnant.”

“What?” He was washing his hands, not really paying attention.

“People always want what they can’t have.” She was still in the paper dress, but she was sitting up and relatively comfortable. She lifted her finger to emphasize her point. “But if I can have it, then I don’t have to want it, right?”

“True,” he said, and laughed. “Seriously though, you should start trying soon. You’re thirty-two. I’m sure you know that fertility declines sharply in a woman’s thirties, and by the time she’s forty, she—”

“I know, but I don’t want children. I feel so much surer of that now. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome?” the doctor said. He looked thoroughly confused, but Kyra was too happy to care. Since it was possible to have a child, she wouldn’t have to want one anymore. She marveled at how simple it was.

It was Friday night, her favorite night of the week to be with her husband, and, she noted, as she walked in the door around six, another reason not to have a baby. After teaching all week, David was usually in a fabulous mood, and this Friday was no exception. He was already home, and he’d brought steaks and asparagus and bread and a bottle of Kyra’s favorite Chablis.

“I just fired up the broiler,” he said, kissing her. “How was your day?”

“Same old,” she said, feeling a bit guilty. “What did you want to do tonight?”

“Whatever you want, my darling wife. After all the grading I’ve been doing for the last two days, I could hang upside down by my thumbs and not mind.” He leaned back and grinned. “I’m saying I’m game for the games.”

The games were Kyra’s logic puzzles. She had several books of them, and she loved solving them with David. They didn’t require any math knowledge, which she emphasized, though David was right when he said she had an advantage. Still, he won fairly often, at least a third of the time, and winning wasn’t really the purpose. It was the two of them thinking together until they revealed the beautiful pattern of the puzzle. Beautiful to her, anyway. David said it was interesting and fun, but she could tell he didn’t see the point to all this. In a way, there wasn’t a point—which was the point. These intricate patterns had absolutely nothing to do with their lives. They could think about them forever without running into a real problem. Like what David should do about the grad student he was working with who seemed depressed. Or how Kyra should deal with the new boss who was alienating everyone in the department. Or David’s mother, who seemed so fragile after a bout with pneumonia last winter. Or Kyra’s complicated feelings about her father’s death from a heart attack last January. Or Amy, who hadn’t come back for the funeral—another shocking sign that her sister had really meant it when she’d said that Kyra would never see her again for the rest of their lives.

How could Amy have meant that?

When they worked the logic puzzles together, Kyra forgot about all of it. She even forgot about the question of whether she wanted a baby. But the next morning, she wrote −1 without hesitating. If they’d had a baby, they wouldn’t have had that lovely evening, eating David’s perfectly cooked steaks and asparagus topped with sea salt while they discussed how to get the robots across the bridge in puzzle number 142.

The baby would constantly be there; that was a huge problem with the whole idea. The baby would be like a
very
needy stranger forcing him- or herself into David and Kyra’s life, which was going quite well, thank you. They could talk and drink and laugh and have sex whenever they wanted. Why would they want to trade this quiet life for the chaotic reality of parenthood? Why would anyone, when you got right down to it?

She had day after day of peaceful −1s until a few weeks later, on Saturday, when they went to a barbecue at Quon and Li’s house. Quon was a colleague of David’s who lived way out in the suburbs, in a cute borough called Doylestown. He and Li had two kids in grade school and a fourteen-month-old toddler. Kyra liked Li, even if spending time with her was always a challenge. Everywhere the toddler went, Li followed, and Kyra could either follow, too, or just stand in the kitchen like an idiot. So she followed and tried to continue her conversation with Li as the baby pulled open a dresser drawer and dropped sweaters on the rug, or took books off the bookshelf, one by one, until all of Li’s women’s history books were flung about the room as if the bookshelf had been hit by a hurricane. In fact, Kyra thought of the toddler as “Hurricane Baby.” “I know I’m spoiling him,” Li had explained, smiling. “I can’t help it. He’s my last one.”

The picnic made everything harder because the outside world was not amenable to being childproofed, meaning everywhere Hurricane Baby went was potentially dangerous. The other two kids were playing soccer with David and Quon. They looked like they were having fun, but Kyra couldn’t be sure. She and Li had followed Hurricane Baby from the swing set to the tree to the front yard. Finally, at the back fence, they’d been able to stop long enough to look at each other while they talked, thanks to the toddler’s fascination with the neighbor’s barking German shepherd.

Li was discussing an article she’d read in the
New York Times
, something about airlines lowering their fares to certain cities—Kyra couldn’t be sure of the details because Hurricane Baby’s squeals kept revving up the dog. By the time Li said she had to run into the house to go to the bathroom, Kyra was desperate to follow her right up to the bathroom door, anything to get away from this noise. But she could hardly object when Li asked her to stay here and watch Ping. “I’ll be right back,” Li said. She kissed the baby. “Mommy loves you.”

Ping was too in love with the dog to let out his usual where’s-Mommy wail. Kyra couldn’t tell whether the dog reciprocated Ping’s feelings, but she did know enough about dogs to keep the toddler from sticking his little hands through the fence, where he might get bitten. Ping was actually pretty cooperative; at least he was after she said no and pointed at the house, to show him where they were headed if he didn’t follow this rule. The poor baby was not doing anything wrong when the dog circled back in his yard and charged right for them, easily hopping the fence and landing on Ping, knocking him backward. Maybe the dog was just being playful, but Ping was screaming and Kyra was horrified. She pulled the dog off the baby so fast that, later, she couldn’t even tell David how she did it. The next thing she knew Ping was in her arms. He was crying, but more from fear than from pain. He only had little scratches on his legs. Kyra, on the other hand, had two bites on her forearm that were gushing blood all over Ping’s green polka-dot onesie.

A moment later, everyone was there: Li, who anxiously examined her baby and pronounced him basically unharmed; David, who said Kyra needed to go to the ER; Quon’s boys, who said that dog had bitten a neighbor kid; and Quon, who asked his boys why they hadn’t ever mentioned this. Then the neighbor and owner of the dog came over, an older man, but Kyra didn’t hear what he said because David was leading her back up to the patio. Li came with them and gave David a few clean towels to wrap the wounds until they got to the Doylestown Hospital.

The news was as good as it could be under the circumstances. The shepherd had had all his vaccinations. Though the bites looked horrible, once the ER doc cleaned them up, they only required about a dozen stitches each. The color came back to David’s cheeks and he seemed almost normal, if a little shaken. Kyra had no idea how she seemed, but her shirt and jeans were covered with bloodstains. She couldn’t wait to get home and change.